The 18-year-old admits he peed near the reservoir, just not into it. From Vocativ:

Eager
to shred with some friends, he and two buddies went to skateboard at
Mount Tabor Park after hours, which is home to three of the city's five
uncovered drinking water reservoirs – and a handful of excellent hill
runs. After bombing down the park's western slope, nature began to call
Swonger. It was around 1 a.m. and the three friends, along with two
other people they met in the park, were near one of the reservoirs.

"I
was like, 'Dudes I have to piss so bad,'" Swonger said. "So I just went
over to the wall [of the reservoir].I leaned up against the wall and
pissed on it. Right there on the wall, dude. I don't know else how to
describe it."

City
officials disagree. "When you see the video, he's leaning right up
because he has to get his little wee wee right up to the iron bars,"
Portland Water Bureau administrator Davd Shaff told the Oregonian. "There's really no doubt what he's doing."

The
teen also weighed in on the city's decision to flush the 38 million
gallons. "Yeah, it's retarded dude," he said. "Like, how they
can do that? How can they be like, 'Yeah, we're gonna flush all that
water.' Dude, I've seen dead birds in there. During the summer time I've
see hella dead animals in there. Like dead squirrels and sh*t. I mean,
really, dude?"

Guilty or not, Swonger says he now regrets the entire incident.

"Everybody
thinks it's funny and a joke and I'm going to be on the news," he said.
"It's no *&%^$#@Ein' joke, dude. I don't want people thinkin' that Dallas
is dumb ass because he pissed in the *&%^$#@Ein' water. In our drinking
water. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, wouldn't you be pissed
about that?"

Here's How Long That Teen Would Have to Pee in the Portland Reservoir to Make It Unsafe to Drink

Oh, Portland. A teenager urinated into one of the city’s drinking
water reservoirs the other day. That’s gross, sure, and aggravating—what
a brat! But in one of the most spectacularly stupid decisions in years,
the city is going to drain the reservoir. The most spectacularly stupid decision in about three years, anyway—if this sounds familiar, that’s because Portland did the same thing in 2011.

The decision seems to be based on some combination of chemophobia, homeopathy, and pee shame. The dose makes the poison,
and clearly this dose is negligible. But is it possible to calculate
precisely how illogical Portland’s decision is? Let’s try to put some
numbers on it.

Several smart people on Twitter
quickly did the math and figured that a typical urination of about 1/8
gallon in a reservoir of 38 million gallons amounts to a concentration
of 3 parts per billion. That’s billion with a b. For comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit for arsenic in drinking water—arsenic!—is 10 ppb.

The EPA doesn’t appear to have a limit for urine in drinking water, but it does limit nitrates in drinking water to 10,000 ppb, and urine does contain a lot of nitrogen, so let’s use that as a proxy.

How many times would that teenager have to pee in a Portland
reservoir to produce a urine concentration approaching the EPA’s limit
for nitrates in drinking water? About 3,333 times.

But of course urine is 95 percent water. (If you’re ever trapped in rubble after a natural disaster, go ahead and drink it.)
Only about 2 percent of urine is nitrogen-rich urea. That means he’d
have to urinate 166,666 times for the concentration of urea to approach
that of the EPA’s limit for nitrates in drinking water.

Since most animals, including idiot teenaged show-offs, take about 21
seconds to urinate, that means he’d have to urinate constantly for
3,500,000 seconds, or about 40 days. Hopefully, he’d have friends
constantly supplying him with tasty Portland microbrews.

Needless to say, this doesn’t take into account the fact that the
resulting 1.3 million gallons of urine, which again is 95 percent water,
would raise the volume of the reservoir. So add another day or two of
peeing to really make the water unsafe to drink.

Draining the reservoir is paranoid, illogical, and expensive. But the
most frustrating thing to me about the whole episode is that there is
actually something Portland could do to its water supply that would have
an immediate, positive, and repeatedly scientifically validated impact
on public health: Add fluoride. Paranoia is not healthy.

Iono. If they didn't flush it some odd bacteria would have popped up causing some sort of epidemic then folks would have been saying the reservoir should have been drained regardless of the cost. *shrugs* there was no right answer really IMO. Folks are shading because nothing has happened.

Or...it could be a push for fluoride like a previous poster mentioned. *shrugs*

First World Problems. Its drought time in Jamaica with regular water lock-offs in soem areas, low water pressure in others, reservoirs are loooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwww so Portland can send us that 38 million gallons of water since they got water to waste, CHO!

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